I'm about to finish my last year at East Los Angeles College, and this post can only begin to explain my frustration with ELAC and with the LACCD as a whole. The district's attempts to perform even its most basic functions would be laughable at best. Whether it's financial aid, counseling, or almost everything else you can think of, this school district seems inept at almost everything it does, largely at the expense of the taxpayers who pay for all of it, as well as the students just trying to get the fuck out of the system. I'm currently sitting on provisional acceptances from three different CSUs, but if the system somehow fails me again by not sending my transcripts on time, unnecessarily withholding my financial aid, or blocking me from enrolling in courses purely due to human incompetence (more on this below), the best case scenario is that I'll be held back until Spring 2021. Worst case scenario is an extended camping trip by the 110 Fwy. And that's not even factoring in the effects of COVID-19 on the education system.

(As a disclaimer, I'll admit here that a lot of this sounds really convoluted and complex. I honestly can't help it, because that's how this education system is designed.)

I'm a low-income, full-time student at East LA College pursuing a Business AD-T (Associate Degree for Transfer) and a B.S. in Information Systems. Under normal circumstances, I qualify for Pell Grants, Cal Grants, various scholarships and loans. For reasons I won't get into, I was put on academic probation early in my academic career due to a series of W's and F's. Students on academic probation who want financial aid have to attend a workshop and meet with a counselor to establish a Student Education Plan, or SEP. An SEP is basically a contract between the student and the school detailing what courses the student will have to take in order to meet their academic goals. Any deviation from the SEP, like failing a course or taking courses that are not on the agreed-upon list, basically constitutes a "breach" of this contract, which disqualifies the student from receiving financial aid. The student can appeal to have their status reinstated, and the appeal process works like this: Meet with a counselor to approve the classes in question, submit the counselor's approval to the financial aid office along with a request for reinstatement, and wait for the financial aid office to make a decision.

In my opinion, this is a pretty fair process. You shouldn't qualify for grants if you fuck up in school, and you should have to prove that you give a shit about your education if you want the government to subsidize it. So that's what I did. In Spring 2019, I attended the financial aid workshop and set up an SEP with the counselor. By Summer 2019, I qualified for Academic Renewal, which basically wiped out my previous W's and F's. By Spring 2020, I had a 3.94 GPA. With other courses I took outside of the LACCD, I could petition to graduate with my AD-T this semester, and I would be eligible for admission to a CSU for Fall 2020.

Over the past 12 months, I have been running back and forth between the Counseling and Financial Aid offices (at least four times each semester) to make sure that I was on track and that everything was in order. (Spoiler: It wasn't.) Last summer, a counselor told me that I would have to be "assessed" for math, because my education plan included MATH 236, Calculus for Business and Social Science, which had a prerequisite. I'm an older, non-traditional student who's been out of high school for quite some time, and there is a special process for people like me called Self-Assessment. Self-Assessment gives students the opportunity to simply state their math proficiency without being tested on it. Essentially, this is a piece of paper with a series of math problems asking how well you can solve them without actually making you solve them. Prerequisites are then waived based on your answers. For example, if you check off that you can solve the given algebra equation, you are no longer required to take algebra. The counselor would then update your SEP and grant you permission to take courses that have algebra as a prerequisite. It's a pretty rudimentary process to say the least, but it qualified me for MATH 236.

Or at least, that's what should've happened.

About six months later, I tried to enroll in MATH 236. "You have not satisfied the prerequisite for this course." I had to meet with a counselor again. At ELAC, counselors only take appointments on Fridays, and appointments are scheduled for the following week. Appointments get filled fast, and walk-ins throughout the week are generally turned away unless it's for something trivial. Given that this was only a few weeks before the start of the semester, I couldn't afford to wait; classes can fill up pretty quickly, and I needed this one to transfer. So I looked through the catalogs and articulation agreements on Assist.org, and found that the CSUs also accept MATH 238. What is MATH 238? Calculus for Business and Social Science. Apparently, MATH 236 and MATH 238 are the same exact course, and both satisfy the same transfer requirements that I need. Once I found an opening for MATH 238 at another school, I clicked add. "Course added." Pretty stupid, but I was pleased to find any kind of solution.

Except I had only created another problem.

Looking at my financial aid info for Spring, I noticed that I wasn't set to receive my usual amount. This has happened before, and the financial aid staff told me that, occasionally, the system needed "time to update" the information. With 30,000 students and only a skeleton staff to service them at any given time, I felt like that was a fair explanation. But once the time came to receive my aid, I only received half of my usual grants, none of my scholarship, and none of my loans. So I went back to the financial aid office to find out what happened.

Remember what I said about the SEP and taking classes not on the list? Since MATH 238 wasn't MATH 236, I was disqualified from financial aid. According to the system, Calculus for Business and Social Science wasn't Calculus for Business and Social Science. No, that's not a typo. That's how the LACCD system read it. I was ineligible because I took the same course in the same district with a different number. Never mind that I had just gone through an entire year of straight A's. Never mind that the district assigned two different numbers to the same course between its own schools without a mechanism to recognize them as the same course. And never mind that a counselor, whose job it might be to identify or foresee these types of redundancies, would somehow fail to include MATH 238 on my SEP in the first place. Different 3-digit number for the same class, no money. As for the cherry to go on top of this shit sundae, I could only learn about this after the fact by personally going to the office, taking a number, waiting in line behind 50 other students with similar problems, and asking one of three staff members in the office when it was finally my turn. No emails. No notifications. No visible holds on my account. No other way of knowing what was happening without joining 50 other students in a stampede.

At this point, all of this still seemed like a minor inconvenience. After all, it was my fault for not consulting with the counselor as soon as I decided to enroll in a different class. In hindsight, it was naive to expect the LACCD system to recognize Calculus as Calculus if the class had a different number. At the time, though, I honestly had no idea that the SEP would trump every other possible qualification for financial aid, but I really should have known. Still, there were factors here that were entirely out of my control, and I'm still utterly dumbfounded by what happened next.

After figuring all of this out and learning about the appeal process, I went straight to the Counseling Office to get my SEP amended for MATH 238. This was a Monday, so I basically had to Jedi-mind-trick my way in, because I knew the front desk staff would've turned me away if I mentioned the SEP, financial aid, or anything else that wasn't a basic question. But once I was explained my situation to the counselor, they said I would have to set up an appointment anyway if I wanted to discuss my SEP. So I waited until Friday to schedule an appointment, and met with them again the following Wednesday.

First, I asked the counselor about the two classes. She said, "Must have been the system. Those classes are the same." I asked why I couldn't get MATH 236 in the first place. She asked, "Have you done a Self-Assessment?" As it turned out, the previous counselor never submitted it. So, in addition to including MATH 238 to my SEP, I had to also complete another Self-Assessment, just in case the system "caught up" with my enrollment in MATH 238 and kicked me out because of missing prereqs. (This was entirely my idea, although the counselor validated my concerns.) After all that was cleared up, I had to compose a formal request for reinstatement and submit it to the financial aid office with the rest of my paperwork. I asked how long it would take to process.

"30 business days."

It would take six whole weeks, on top of the one and a half weeks I already spent trying to see the counselor, for the Financial Aid office to determine that Calculus was, in fact, Calculus. In my letter, I had to include that this was my last semester at ELAC, that I had already been accepted to a CSU, and that this money was essential to my academic success. I had to use words like "implore" and "greatly appreciated." I had to plead for the loans I'll have to pay back. I had to beg for the scholarship I had already won.

Two weeks later, ELAC was closed due to COVID-19 concerns and all classes were suspended.

Given everything that's going on, I have to assume that ELAC staff went through the same transition to work-from-home as other organizations have, with all the technical difficulties, under-staffing, and budget constraints befitting of a community college system that can't seem to function properly even without a global pandemic hindering its normal operations. What was originally a six-week process is now probably much longer. Any assurances from LACCD are essentially meaningless at this point, especially given that they seem to be in a great hurry to tell me to fuck off whenever I ask about it. The president of the college refuses to comment about these matters at length during his Facebook town hall meetings, instead directing any related questions to the Financial Aid office while spending the rest of the hour vaguely talking about how they're working to sanitize all the facilities and classrooms, as if returning to campus by the end of this semester was a possibility. And this is all happening as I watch our illustrious faculty, some of the most intelligent and most educated people I have ever met, somehow struggle with learning management systems like Canvas after the college suspended classes for an extra week for "Canvas Training."

Now, I'm sitting around burning through what's left of my savings in anticipation for that next deposit that may or may not come. I do feel somewhat fortunate that this process got set in motion before the campuses were closed, and I'm sure it will be resolved in due time. But at the end of the day, I'm concerned about the current state of LACCD, and what it means for the students who are going to have (or have already had) their academic careers derailed due to administrative nonsense. If I hadn't been as frugal, or if I didn't stash some of my money away in preparation for the giant shitstorm we're now living in, I would almost certainly be in threat of becoming food and/or housing insecure. And it goes without saying that being hungry, homeless and under constant threat of contracting a dangerous virus can really fuck with your GPA.

I'm sure others are far less fortunate. Last semester, I saw a girl bawling her eyes out at the Financial Aid office, complaining that she was "never told anything" about her status or eligibility. I think about that girl every time I'm there, because I understand her feelings all too well. This is a system where 69% of students are low-income, where 53% live at or below the poverty line, and where 1 in 5 students are homeless. This isn't money that we could spend frivolously even if we wanted to. This is about our survival. The amount they give me only allows me to pay for the things I need: Tuition, room and board, textbooks, supplies, and transportation. I'm not building a $2000 gaming rig. I'm not going to Coachella. I'm not collecting Ultraboosts. I'm investing to build a better future for myself, so that I might one day build a better future for everyone else.

And while we're talking about how we spend our money, let's talk about how the district spends our money. Back in 2011, LACCD came under some serious scrutiny when the LA Times discovered how the Board of Trustees mishandled their $5.7 billion reconstruction program. Here are some of the highlights, the rest of which can be read here and here:

• $39 million at West LA College for buildings that couldn't be completed.
• $3.4 million at Valley College to renovate a theater that eventually got torn down when they decided to build a new one instead.
• $1.8 million at LA City College to design a fitness center, only to spend another $1.9 million to design it for another location.
• $28 million at East LA College on botched renovations, and another $15 million to repair them. This included $157,000 to fix a crooked clock tower.
• $350,000 for promotional videos and public relations, including Feng Shui consultations and biographical videos.
• $4.36 million per year to maintain unused classrooms, labs, and offices.

Of course, I'm hardly educated enough to speak too intelligently on any of this. My two A's in financial and managerial accounting only qualify me to say that those ledgers must look really fucking ugly, especially with taxpayer dollars on the other side of them.

But in my capacity as a lowly community college student, I can talk about what I've seen at my school. I've seen construction crews dig up giant holes in the quad only to leave them alone for an entire year. I've seen empty plots of dirt become luxury hotels in the time it takes for ELAC to build a parking lot. I've seen instructors fumble with poorly-configured technology before surrendering to their markers and whiteboards. I've seen classes get canceled over a water leak that flooded an entire building that was only two years old. I've seen students get held back an extra semester because they couldn't get a counseling appointment and missed the grad petition deadline by two weeks. And I've seen a string of systemic failures, human errors, and administrative bullshit that continue to impede my chances of transferring to a CSU without becoming homeless in the process.

With the exception of the excellent campus WiFi, I would gladly trade any one of these so-called campus improvements for a few more adequately-trained counselors and service staff, so that maybe I won't have to become destitute over a lost assessment form.

TL;DR

I couldn't enroll in a class because a counselor didn't turn in a form. Enrolling in the same class somewhere else got me kicked off of financial aid. I had to appeal to have my financial aid reinstated in a process that was already going to take six weeks before the COVID-19 closures. My chances of not being homeless and transferring to a four-year school this year depend on LACCD not fucking anything else up. Meanwhile, the district continues to burn taxpayer money on useless shit while failing to serve its own students.